Gary Grimshaw (February 25, 1946 – January 13, 2014) was an American graphic artist active in Detroit and San Francisco who specialized in designing rock concert posters.
[3] According to Kramer, "Grimshaw was the best artist in our neighborhood" and "We drew hot rod cars and he knew the secret of how to capture chrome, which made him the coolest to a Downriver greaser like me.
[4] He would drive his friends from the working class, mostly white Polish Catholic suburb of Lincoln Park to the more cosmopolitan areas around Wayne State University in Detroit, looking for "beatnik parties" and listening to jazz performers like John Coltrane on the car radio.
While there, he visited two famous rock concert venues, the Avalon Ballroom and The Fillmore, and studied light show operators at work.
Grimshaw designed the first poster for the Grande Ballroom, for a show on October 7, 1966, featuring the MC5 and billed as "A Dance Concert in the San Francisco Style".
[4] At a party about the same time, he met John Sinclair, a poet and jazz critic who had just been released from six months in jail on a marijuana conviction.
His work appeared in many newspapers of the underground press, including the San Francisco Oracle, the Berkeley Tribe, the Fifth Estate and the Ann Arbor Sun.
[5] Grimshaw did many posters for the MC5 and worked with the Detroit Artists Workshop, Translove, the Hill House commune in Ann Arbor, Michigan, and later for the Rainbow Peoples Party, successor to the White Panthers.
In 1968, he was indicted on a marijuana charge in Grand Traverse County, Michigan along with Pun Plamondon,[4] and fled to San Francisco and Boston, where he continued designing posters.
Speakers at the event included Bobby Seale of the Black Panther Party, Jerry Rubin of the Yippies, and beat poet Allen Ginsberg.
[11] During these years Grimshaw created posters for Beck, the White Stripes, The Greenhornes, the Dirtbombs and the Raveonettes, and for a 2004 tribute concert in memory of guitarist Fred "Sonic" Smith of the MC5.